5 April 2012

The extended hiatus of the live music section of this site is hereby ended by indie pop/dance punk outfit Friends, fronted by the alluring Samantha Urbani.

Friends’ polyamory anthem “I’m His Girl” features a killer bass line and emulates that 60’s soul sound with great care on the studio recording (Youtube, Spotify). Full danceability is maintained on stage, as displayed in this high quality concert video by Noisey.

Also note the band’s recent song Va Fan Gör Du (Swedish for “What the hell are you doing?”).

I’m no expert on the iPad and its intended content format. But content like, say, the kind you’d get through an attempt at developing the glossy magazine concept, is worthless unless everything in it has urls and is googleable. Bear in mind that I’m the kind of person who’s having issues with the fact that newspapers and mags don’t put some kind of unique alphanumeric id on all articles inside the regular paper issue.

Something like Spotify’s url system for linking to artists, albums, song, playlists etc. represents a bare minimum of sharing features for content distributed through a proprietary distribution platform. In the case of Spotify, users still have to turn to third party services to gain basic web access to metadata. Being someone who gets most of his magazine reading done via url recommendations over the web and IRC, I’d have very little use for a modern magazine kind of medium if its content isn’t accessible via urls somehow.

But I have to say that trying to build a distribution platform resembling Spotify, Steam or iTunes for magazines/text/photo/video clip content just for the sake of control is a terrible idea. If done right, such a platform could be based on websites with paywalls (optimized for different screens) and provide cute custom applications for e.g. better local offline storage of content.

10 February 2010

I don’t mind paying a service like Spotify for streaming, and I wouldn’t mind Spotify putting parts of a steadily growing catalog behind a subscription paywall.

But if major labels start withdrawing their content before services like these get a chance to develop properly, I guess it’s back to not paying shit for major label music and developing encrypted p2p in case you wanna discover music through other sources than fucked up FM radio cesspits. Huge tech projects like Spotifyneed time. We’re talking 5+ years, which was the time it took for Last.fm to develop into a nice, mature service. And one thing is certain, the major music labels couldn’t and wouldn’t have built anything approaching the non-shittiness of Spotify on their own. At this point it’s clear to me that that record labels are as greedy as anyone and that they need someone with an outsider’s perspective and interests to produce products that don’t anal probe their users constantly.

And as far as download stores are concerned: The recording industry is still failing to deliver FLAC, lossless/full quality, downloads, which is what I require for purchases (well, following my statement about outsiders, this would be Apple’s or Spotify’s job). For me, there’s no problem in paying for streaming from a giant catalog in a good quality format like the 320 kbps Vorbis Spotify delivers to subscribers of their premium service. But I’m not paying for lossy archive copies.

1 October 2009

After I subscribed to Premium to get rid of the ads, they’ve added high quality streams (320 kbps Vorbis goodness!) and now offline access to the desktop and mobile clients. I’ll definitely renew my subscription next year.